You do know sound travels through air don't you? — Isaac

:brow:

Why couldn't you do a "what if" in the same vein about any arbitrary thing?

"What if anger about being spurned romantically sparks violence, and that violence sparks revenge, and that revenge sparks genocide?" etc.

So let's prohibit romantic spurning.

We could prohibit any and everything with such speculation.

Why do people cry during films if there isn't some element to where you actually believe that the film is happening? — thewonder

Because you can empathize with the idea of something, with things you imagine to be the case.

There isn't only one option. I think you need to backtrack and explain yourself properly before directing such loaded questions my way. — S

When we're talking causality, there's only one option.

The UK recently put out a paper about “online harms”, using it as justification for regulating speech on the internet.

“Harms”, premised on the notion that words and ideas have certain harmful consequences, is the penultimate excuse for censors. Words will have bad effects, therefor words must be silenced. — NOS4A2

Well, and anyone can consider anything a harm to themselves, for any reason. So we can't just go with a blanket "harm" criterion. So then it becomes a matter of what someone wants to count versus what they don't want to count, which is really just an excuse to disallow stuff they don't personally like.

But I reject that. I think that it makes more sense to continue to talk about decisions and choices, — S

How is it a decision or choice if there's only one option?

So close, and yet so far. With a simple qualification to that, — S

What qualification do you use--something vague like "harm"?

The law I want to protect me is not a law prohibiting some speech, but a law prohibiting laws prohibiting speech.

Not being able to walk down a street because someone is throwing rocks of a building is not. . . — S

Speech.

That's what he asked about.

Our foundational positions may be, — Isaac

Well that's the whole point. It's not as if I'm saying that the the guy could have a problem throwing rocks off the building on a whim. It's reasoned from my foundations (which I expressed above).

I'm guessing you must think it's bad to inhibit people from doing what they want. Is that it? — Relativist

Yes. Didn't I explicitly say that? I thought I had.

I'd say I answered this above in a response to Relativist, but you probably consider that a "random philosophical principle."

What I don't know, though, is how any answer here wouldn't either be a "random philosophical principle" or just some arbitrary whim. What other option would you say there is? What else do you think we're doing when we make choices about this sort of stuff?

Now, setting your confused distractions and nitpicking aside, what's your response to that? To block out reason, disregard cause and effect, and play on words like "decision" and "choice" as though these are magically independent of cause and effect? — S

Decisions/choices aren't decisions/choices if they're caused. Compatibilism makes no sense.

Yes. Because remember the third option... Life's not perfect. Sometimes we have to accept a very substandard compromise where there's no better alternative. Personally I'd rather live in a world where people are prevented by law from throwing rock off buildings and where the law might also ban something I consider to be fine, than live in a world where I can't even walk down the street, but at least the government hasn't made my hat choices illegal. — Isaac

Here's my policy on "criminal threatening" by the way:

Threatening anyone should only be a crime when it's an immediate, "physical" threat in the sense of potential victims being within the range of the threatening instruments (whether just one's body, or weapons, or causally connected remote devices or substances, etc.), which are actual and not simply claimed, so that (a) either a verbal (or written, etc.) or body language or weaponry threat is explicitly made/performed, (b) the threat is reasonably considered either a serious premeditation to commit nonconsensual violence or something with negligent culpability should nonconsensual physical damage result, and (c) the threatened party couldn't reasonably escape or evade the threatened actions should the threatener decide or negligently carry them out at that moment.

So in some circumstances, simply the guy throwing rocks off the building would be a problem.

Secondly, it depends on what the property owner is consenting to or not. (We hadn't gotten into property issues at all, since it wasn't pertinent to anything we were talking about.)

Aside from that, you can simply walk down the street and avoid that building. That's not that hard to do. If the guy hits you with a rock, then either he's going to be in trouble or it wasn't something that injured you much if at all. So the risk of that is going to stop a lot of people from throwing rocks off of buildings (or whatever).

That's the non-perfect option I'll go with.

Free speech is not some objective moral value. — Relativist

Nothing is an objective moral value. There are no such things.

You value it because of what you perceive to be the positive consquences. — Relativist

Because there are no objective moral values, I basically take the track of "letting people what they want to do" as much as possible. That's not completely possible, because then we'd ironically end up with people controlling others to a greater extent--some people want to control others, via force if they need to, which they'll gladly invoke. So I take the approach of allowing all consensual actions and prohibiting nonconsensual actions, which is forcibly controlling others. This is also why I have the policy about prisons that I do, by the way (where I don't at all agree with how we've set up prisons--I'd do something very different with the people we need to separate from mainstream society because they want to control others via physical force, etc.).

The negatives have not been demonstrated to your satisfaction, but neither have you demonstrated the positive consequences to my (and perhaps others') satisfaction. — Relativist

The positive consequence is letting people do what they want a la consensual actions, rather than controlling others.

Yes. The second one. — Isaac

Right. So you're not actually basing policy on persons' emotional reactions, either. You're basing them on the emotional reactions you're subjectively giving approval to. Which is just another way of trying to enforce your personal whims.

The problem with having laws hinging on something like someone being afraid to walk down the street is that anyone could be afraid to do anything, for just about any reason. (just like anyone can be offended by anything, feel slighted/disrespected/uncomfortable by anything, etc.)

You should know this well if you really have a background in psychology, Isaac.

That means that either we potentially ban any arbitrary thing--just in case someone is afraid of it (offended by it, etc.)--or we have people making laws based only on the fears that they deem "reasonable," where such designations are completely subjective (this is an ontological fact), where they're going to be based on social norms, etc.

You're clearly either a sociopath or (more likely I suspect) simply pretending to be one for effect. — Isaac

:smirk:


(The emojis on this board stink by the way)

But why? You subjectively value free speech so highly that you are willing to accept the negative consequences. — Relativist

As I've been explaining over and over in this thread, I don't accept that we can at all demonstrate that there are negative consequences (especially of the sort that I'd legislate against, as I've been describing just today, in posts just above)

Ah. So you disagree with all laws aimed at protected people from harm. — Isaac

I wouldn't say that, but I don't frame it that way. It's too vague.

I'd have laws that punish someone for hitting someone else for a rock nonconsensually, where it's an injury that's macro-observable at least a week later, say. That's a law against harm, but it's pretty specific.

I'd also have a "criminal threatening" category (which I can paste the details of if you're interested . . . I pasted it here recently, though I don't recall where).

But I'm certainly not going to have a law based on someone being afraid to walk down a street.

Maybe I could frame it in your terms then. I wish to throw rock off a building. You wish to walk down the street below but can't do so for fear of being hit by rocks. I frame that in terms of comparing my right to throw rocks with your right to walk down the street unmolested. How do you frame that dilemma? — Isaac

Being afraid to walk down the street because someone is throwing rocks isn't any sort of consent violation.

If someone hits you with a rock as you walk down the street, and it's a bad enough injury, then yes, that's a consent violation. (Well, assuming you don't say you consented to being hit with the rock.)

So you're saying that there is never a need to decide whether to allow one person's liberty when it might constrain another's? — Isaac

Not on my view, because I don't frame anything in terms of "allowing liberties" or "constraining liberties."

What I allow is any and all consensual actions, and disallow nonconsensual actions of a certain severity. That's it. (At least when we're talking about this sort of stuff.)

If those two liberties clashed (ie you can't have one without removing the other) which would you remove and by what degree? — Isaac

I don't frame anything in terms of "liberties clashing" (or "rights" for that matter). I don't know why I have to explain this so many times. All that matters in this regard is consent violations.

Personally, I’m an absolutist when it comes to free speech. I believe all speech should be allowed. — NOS4A2

:up:

how would you rate the liberty to say "Jews should all be killed" compared to the liberty to walk down the street, get a job, a house, live wherever you choose and retain your property? — Isaac

I don't know how to answer "rating" such things. I'd not prohibit anyone from saying anything, walking down any public street, getting a job, etc.

Is there some natural force in existence that specifically prevents such a hypothetical from being the case? — Isaac

No.

It's just that we'd need to show that it's the case--we'd need to have good reasons to believe it, which would involve empirical evidence, in order to move ahead with it.

Would you accept that, if it were the case that a person's freedom to walk safely down the street were restricted by hate speech then their freedom to do so is of greater importance than the other's freedom to speak as they see fit? — Isaac

No. That's way too vague. What I'd say is that if hate speech were a causal action that resulted in physical forces nonconsensually applied to the person walking down the street, where we're talking about something that has a significant physical effect on the person (macro-observable physical effects, say, at least a week after the event), then I'd have no problem considering the hate speech in question a crime/I'd have no problem prohibiting it.

Note that you treat unrestricted free speech as the ultimate good. — Relativist

If I had to pick something I treat as "the ultimate good" it would be unrestricted consensual actions. Speech would be just one example. (Again, remember that I don't consider it necessary for observers or non-physically-forced bystanders to consent; they're not parties in the actions in question. They're passive instead.)

However, I'd be picking that in the manner that I might pick "My 10 favorite musical artists" or something like that, where the answer isn't so black & white really, and I'm picking 10 just to pick 10 and play along--even though they'd be 10 of my favorites, just not THE 10 favorites period.

I would say that another "ultimate good," and unfortunately one that we're much further away from in practice, is creating a system where people don't have to worry about things like housing, food, health care, education, employment, travel/mobility, leisure activities/leisure time, etc.

the world as we know it would be just as we know it without any witness. — frank

I agree with that view as long as we're strictly talking about objective stuff (hopefully that makes sense--it's the simplest way to say it), but I still think that it's not coherent to suppose anything can be absent a "POV."

It's probably too much to get into (I've explained it in some detail on the board, but I don't recall the thread or who it was in response to), but basically the idea is that properties are different (not necessarily, perhaps, but most are) at different points of reference ("POVs" in the terms above), and there's no way to have a "non-POV POV" for properties to be some way from.

Consistency. Name one other situation in which putting someone in a risky situation (high risk of pleasure and high risk of pain) from a less risky situation — khaled

First, antinatalism isn't about putting someone in a risky situation. There's no one to put into a situation until we get past the point that antinatalism wants us to not pass.

from a less risky situation without their consent is considered moral and where they do not benefit whatsoever from the shift. — khaled

Aside from the above, this seems like a pretty loaded question. How would there be a high risk of pleasure while the person does not benefit whatsoever from the shift? That seems contradictory. If we're limited to talking about "where they do not benefit whatsoever" then that rules out any chance of pleasure.

What I struggle with is imagining a POV that has no conscious witness. I don't think there is any such thing. We always put a phantom person there and give her a pencil and paper. Without any conscious witness, what we have is Realism-POV without any POV. There are no true statements that can be made about it? — frank

That's interesting because it's more or less the opposite of my ontology, where I'm a realist but I don't think it's coherent to be absent a "POV" (which is probably not the best name for it, but I'll go with your terminology).

The "What if some teenage boy..." example was the context of what we were talking about.

The whole reason we started talking about influence is because you gave the ""What if some teenage boy . . ." example, I wrote "I would say that he decided to take the actions he did, where he at least decided to credit Elliot Rodger as an influence on his decision," and you responded with, "Decisions are influenced, and influences are causes in some respect." Are you saying that "prior cause" didn't apply for "influence" at that point? "Prior cause" only had to do with the later example of the Marx books?

Oh my god. Yes, that's exactly what I was referring to. — S

But that's what led to the influence comments. There was no other example between that and the influence comments. So if you're trying to sell the "prior cause" nonsense as being pertinent to the example at hand at the time the comment was made, that's the example we were discussing.

Because it wasn't. I should know, it was an example taken from my life. That simply wasn't how the events unfolded, and I don't possess a time machine to go back and alter the past. — S

Wait, the example this tangent stemmed from was this: "What if some teenage boy had gone out and murdered a group of popular teenage girls at his school, and then killed himself, and left behind a suicide note and diary explicitly naming Elliot Rodger and incel culture as his motive? "

That is an example taken from your life?

No, I can't see a sticking point, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's actually believing something ... and then setting it aside. Temporary belief is the problem, would you agree? — Pattern-chaser

Ummm . . . hmm--I don't think I understand what you're asking. :confused:

Quite why he said that, I don't know. — Pattern-chaser

Yeah, I don't know why he used "theoretically" either.

So the sticking point was just his word "theoretically"?

I classified them that way because that's what they are, and your point about immediacy only makes sense if you ignore the context of what we were talking about and insert your own in order to make this silly point of yours where it looks like you're trying to prove me wrong about something I never meant or intended, even though in reality you're just appearing oblivious and looking to score a point. — S

In the example you provided, why couldn't the influence be immediately prior to the act?

So, returning to the story example, I do believe the story, its world and its other premises, while I read it. — Pattern-chaser

So, while you read it, do you believe "theoretically in magic or elves or stuff like that"?